The Art of the Engine Driver Read online

  From time to time guests at the party escape the house onto the front lawn. They stand, smoking, talking quietly and hoping to catch some of the cool evening breeze that is drifting in from the schoolyard, through the pines, and over the yards and houses of the street.

  Jimmy is looking up the dirt road before him, watching the comings and goings of the party, sure that in the darkness of the street corner he is hidden from view.

  Two women are standing near the front gate. One has red hair and is wearing a floral evening dress with a single bold strap across the right shoulder. It is not the type of dress he expects to see in this kind of street. The other woman appears to have longer hair and wears a dark dress that merges with the shadowy light. She looks impatient in her manner with the other woman, but it is difficult to be sure. In another corner of the yard, three men are gathered in a small circle, the tips of their cigarettes aglow. They are staring down at the dried lawn at their feet, nodding occasionally, not saying much.

  The remainder of the party is inside the house, talking, listening to the music or dancing to the songs. All of them, the street that has been invited, the father whom he has never met, Patsy Bedser’s fiancé, and Patsy Bedser herself. All of them, no more than a minute’s walk from where he is. But Jimmy makes no move to approach the house. He stays behind the wheel of the car, observing the guests who come and go as they step from the porch, seeking the cool outside air, before rejoining the festivities.

  All the time, the Wolseley sits quietly in the shadows at the corner of the street.

  30.

  Night

  From the kitchen window, looking back in the direction of the golf course, Michael can see out over the vacant paddock next door. Like all the paddocks on the street it is covered with Scotch thistle and long grass. The peach glow has left the sky. The stars are sparkling like the cut-glass bowls in the lounge room. Michael walks toward the open back door of the house and steps out into the yard. To his right the comet, high in the western part of the sky, is slowly passing over the railway lines, over the cutting that leads into the station, having taken the whole summer to get there from the flour mills.

  The dark silhouettes of the schoolyard pines loom before him in the next street. He’s climbed the tallest of those pines and knows the view from the top. He has charted his suburb in the map of his mind and knows its streets and houses and landmarks. He can see it all clearly even now, as if he were still perched at the top of the tallest of those pines and the suburb were spread out beneath him.

  From the yard Michael can see through the back door into the kitchen and the lounge room adjoining it. There is music coming from the record player, and as the house fills, the talk and the laughter becomes louder. Inside, he can see the families from the street, the Millers, the Bruchners, the Youngers, Mr Van Rijn, the Barlows, the Bedsers and all their friends that he’s never met and will probably never see again. And if he can’t see the faces of his neighbours, he can hear their familiar voices, their familiar bursts of laughter or their expressions of surprise. Just as when he hears a certain phrase, a saying called out or shrieked above the usual volume of conversation, he will know that Mr or Mrs so-and-so has arrived, because of the way they speak. Like the way Mrs Barlow turns to her husband in mid-conversation, with everybody standing and watching, and says don’t be stupid Desmond. He can hear and see them all. All of them. The whole street.

  The vacant paddocks either side of the house are swaying in the darkness, and a light breeze passes through its well-lit windows and open doors. The mills have melted into the night, darkness has descended over the schoolyard cricket pitch where one day Michael will bowl the perfect ball, the factory is silent, the factory owner’s Bentley is parked at the end of his long gravel driveway, Skinner’s cows have bedded down. In the distance is the faint rattle of the Saturday night city train.

  Part Two

  Saturday Night

  31.

  Bedser’s Front Yard

  The music of the party is behind him. Michael is facing the front fence of the Bedsers’ house, at the edge of a circle of light created by the streetlight, throwing a worn tennis ball against the pickets. He throws the ball, the ball rebounds and he catches it without letting it touch the ground. His goal is to reach twenty without dropping a catch. But it is difficult. Sometimes the ball hits the picket at an awkward angle and Michael has to dive onto the lawn to take the catch like they do on the television when the cricket is played. Lindwall, Harvey, O’Neill. They all practise their catching like this and so does Michael.

  It is a game that absorbs Michael for hours when he is not bowling against his back fence. Especially the hours between the end of school and the beginning of evening when he is waiting for his parents to return from work. In this way hours pass, the day ends, and the evening is upon him before he knows it.

  At the moment he is counting his catches. Seventeen. He is so concentrated on completing the task he has set himself that he no longer hears the music from the party behind him. He no longer hears the laughter, the voices, raised in argument or exclamation. All he sees is the shadowy line of pickets before him, all he hears is the sound of the ball as it rebounds from the fence, then a small slap in the night, as the worn tennis ball hits the back of his hands.

  But something distracts him. A car has just entered the street. It has not entered the street at any speed, recklessly disturbing the dirt of the road, creating a spectacle and drawing attention to itself. No, this is not why he has noticed it and why he is suddenly distracted. He has noticed the car from the corner of his eye because it has slipped into the street quietly, almost silently. Like it doesn’t want to be noticed. And, for that reason, Michael has noticed it.

  He straightens up, the ball still now in his hand, and examines the dark car parked at the corner of the street. It could be anybody’s car. A guest come late to the party. But the car just sits there. The doors don’t open. Whoever is in this car doesn’t want to be seen. Michael jumps back quickly from the circle of the streetlight and crosses the small front path to the other side of the yard. There, crouched behind a shrub, he can observe the car freely. It is black. He can see the chrome plate shining in the night, outlining the headlamps, the bumper bar and the grille. As his eyes adjust to the light, he focuses more clearly on the car and begins to distinguish its features. It is an Austin Wolseley. Michael knows his cars and this is an English car. With a shock he realises that he knows this particular car from his fishing trips to the country. He knows who is inside it.

  When he realises this he slumps back against the corner of the fence and stares blankly back towards the house. He peers quickly over Bedser’s white picket fence and he sees a match flare inside the car. The man with the long legs and the black pointed boots is there. Watching the party. Absent-mindedly Michael tosses the tennis ball from hand to hand, creating faint slaps in the night.

  The front door of the house opens and his mother and her friend, the one she drinks beer with on hot nights, step into the yard and walk towards the front gate. They are talking quietly, and Michael can’t hear what they are saying. He is conscious once again of the music, and the noise of laughter and talk coming from the party. The door opens again and three men, Mr Bruchner, Mr Younger and a man Michael doesn’t know, walk to the other side of the lawn where they stand in a small circle and drink beer and smoke.

  Nobody knows Michael is crouched in the corner of the yard. Nobody has noticed the car parked at the corner of the street. Michael has stopped tossing the ball from palm to palm. He is waiting for everybody to go and leave the yard to him once more.

  ‘I just want to be able to look back and say I had some fun. I lived a bit. That’s not much to ask.’

  Rita is leaning back against the front gate staring out across the vacant lot next to the Englishman’s house. Her friend is nodding, watching the froth die in her beer glass.

  ‘Well, is it?’

  Rita’s face swings back from the padd
ock to Evie. There is fire in Rita’s eyes and fire in her hair. She pulls the back of her hair out into the evening, tight, as if the strands were strings and she were about to play upon them. Then she lets her hair go and it falls back bobbing about her neck.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No,’ her friend looks up, ‘It’s not.’

  ‘That’s what it comes down to, having fun. I’m thirty-three and I feel like I’ve had mine. We don’t go out any more, we just stay in and stare at the walls. That’s not living. But it wasn’t always like that. Now everything’s just a bloody great effort. What happens?’

  ‘You tell me, I’m married to a truck.’

  Rita barely hears. She is distracted, staring out across the paddock again.

  ‘He was so handsome.’

  ‘Still is.’

  ‘You’re always calling him handsome. Aren’t you?’

  Evie doesn’t answer. She studies Rita, who is staring out across the swaying vacant lot as if it were a wide, expansive sea leading somewhere else.

  ‘What will you do?’

  Rita doesn’t look back.

  ‘Give it one last go. But if it doesn’t work, I swear, I’m not staying out here for anyone.’

  Rita looks around the suburb and shakes her head. For the first time she notices Bruchner, Younger and someone else she doesn’t know standing in the front yard near the lounge-room window. The two groups remain closed and do not acknowledge each other. She doesn’t like them and they don’t like her. Rita knows that. They think she’s a snob, but she doesn’t care. So be it. Her eyes hover for the moment on the compact bulk of Bruchner, then return to her friend.

  ‘I never thought it would come to this. I thought we’d go on forever. And even when things got difficult, I never thought it could actually end.’

  Rita has stopped talking. She is looking out to that vast, private sea again. She can hear the waves now, slapping against each other in the night, smell the open, salty air, hear the call of sea birds. The vacant paddocks of the suburb sway like an ocean leading somewhere.

  In time, when the boy is grown and she and Vic have finally gone their separate ways, Rita will cross that ocean and she will see the greater world she yearns for. Even though it seems impossibly far away at the moment, she will go to it, that great, wondrous world that lies beyond the suburb, and the poky houses and the prying eyes. And all those small minds that look you up and down if you try to look a little smart, that take it personally like an insult and brand you a snob if you look a bit stylish. She will travel outside the invisible walls of the suburb and beyond. But she will travel alone. Vic will not be there. He will move north. He will travel on vast desert trains a mile long and drink black tea two miles below the earth’s surface in the nickel mines of the inland deserts, but Vic will never travel beyond his own country and Rita will never really understand why. Never really understand that he would be lost, a man out of his element. And so Rita will cross that ocean, but there will always be a part of her that will be looking back, wishing she didn’t have to travel it alone. Perhaps, even now, she knows this.

  ‘I’ll get Vic. See if I can drag him away from the fridge.’

  Evie breaks into her thoughts and she turns back from surveying the dark, open paddocks and looks at Evie as if having returned from a journey and wondering where on earth she is.

  ‘Leave him there.’

  ‘I’ll use my charm.’

  But Rita is suddenly annoyed.

  ‘Evie, just leave him there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want him dragged here or anywhere.’

  ‘He won’t be. Trust me.’

  Evie touches Rita’s shoulder lightly and leaves her standing by the gate. As she walks back into the party along the narrow, front path, she is already looking through the open windows for Vic, somewhere in there amongst the laughter and the talk. At the front door she hears the flyscreen door shut behind her. On the record player, one song ends, another begins.

  Evie moves through the guests, nodding, chatting briefly and moving on, the gathering seeming to part around her as she walks from room to room. She can still smell the detergent on her hands and feel the hot water from all the dishes she washed tonight at the golf course. She’s glad there’s a party tonight. Her husband has been on the road now a month. The house is almost continually empty and she couldn’t face walking back to it alone again as she has for the last four Saturdays. During the week she can face an empty house, but not on Saturdays. Houses shouldn’t be empty on Saturdays. Evie likes people around her. She likes a beer and she likes a laugh. And as she walks through the party, she is pleased with the proximity of all these people, as if something could happen. And after a month of lonely Saturdays, on top of all the others, she wouldn’t mind that. She savours the closeness of everybody, the laughter, the talk, the music and the dancing.

  Outside, Rita is still standing at the front gate staring out across the vacant paddocks, sipping a lemonade and beer. After an hour inside the house she wanted some fresh air. So she’s outside. Vic wanted to stay in. She can tell already that he’s throwing down the beers faster than he should, but what’s the point of saying anything? It won’t change a thing, he’ll just go on throwing them down. Even faster.

  And so she stares out across the wide, swaying sea of vacant paddocks and tries to imagine what another life might be like.

  32.

  Vic and Evie

  I like a woman with a beer in her hand. And there she is. She’s walking through the party like she’s looking for someone. Her head turning this way and that. She’s smiling and nodding. Courteous and polite. But she doesn’t really care about any of them. She’s looking for someone in particular.

  But what she doesn’t see is that they’re all looking at her. When she’s passed their eyes all follow her, looking her up and down. The men and the women. The husbands and the wives. They’re looking at her because she’s, what shall we say? a mature woman, she’s on her own, and she’s got a beer in her hand. To some of the women that’s a sign of danger. And the way she’s walking about, looking for someone or something, as if she’s not sure what, and as if she doesn’t care anyway, well, that doesn’t help. To the blokes on this street she’s a bit of a curiosity. They’d like to stop her and talk to her. They’d like a bit of her. But they haven’t got what it takes to stop a woman like that. None of them. Not in this street. She’s not interested in them and they know it. Not that it’s obvious or she lets it show. She’s no snob. She’s not standoffish. But she scares them a bit. Not that she’s the world’s best looker. She looks good, all right. And she’s a well-built woman. But that’s not what she’s got. There’s a bit of a challenge in the way she’s walking about. And this place can see it. The blokes, the women, the husbands and wives who notice her as she passes by. They can all see it. And that’s why she scares them. That’s why they all stand back a bit. This is the kind of woman who shakes things up.

  And there’s the way she holds that beer glass. She holds it like a woman who knows her beer. Some women hold a beer glass like a non-smoker holds a cigarette, like they’re holding it for someone else. But the way this woman holds her beer glass leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that the beer is hers. Just as she leaves you in no doubt that she knows a few things about beer itself. And a bit more besides.

  She’s standing in the middle of the room now, like she’s lost her way. She’s drinking her beer and looking about like she’s ready to turn around and go back to wherever she’s come from because she can’t find who she’s looking for. Then she props, she smiles and she waves – at me.

  Before I know it she’s standing in front of me with an empty beer glass in her hand. That’s the other thing I notice, she doesn’t sip the stuff, she drinks it.

  ‘Hello handsome.’

  That makes me laugh. Like she’s stepped out of a movie or something. Maybe she thinks she has. She’s always calling me handsome. I like it, but it makes me laug
h.

  We’re standing near the back door, there’s a bit of a breeze coming in through the wire, and she’s holding her beer out. I fill the glass with a bottle I’ve stashed away.

  ‘I’ve just left Rita,’ she says. ‘She’s at the front gate. You should go talk to her.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I’m nodding. Should I? It’s not my fault she’s out there and I’m in here. Is it? Naturally, I don’t say this, but I catch her eye as I’m thinking it and it’s as good as said.

  ‘I promised her I’d get you out there.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I like to keep my promises. So I might just hang around till you do.’

  Suit yourself, I’m thinking. Suit yourself. But personally, I can’t see the point in coming to a party if you’re going to stand around in the yard all night. Well, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m not sure what she’s thinking but I give her the once over and with a bit of a shock I see there’s a look there. It’s just a trace, but it’s there. A look that reminds me of the days before I got hitched. And the music, the grog, the noise and all the people. It all helps. Neither of us is saying anything by now. But it doesn’t matter. This is better than talking any day. So we just stand there, side by side, listening to the old songs.

  Sometimes it happens like that. You’re standing around doing the usual things and in walks a different life. No, not a different one. Not really. But a glimpse of one. It shakes you up a bit.

  Like you’re driving along this single track in the night. The moon’s shining down on the rails and that track looks like it could just stretch out in front of you forever. And you feel like you could just put your feet up, boil the tea, lean back in your seat, close your eyes, and let the bloody thing drive itself. And then you realise that you, you are the bloody thing. It’s not driving. You are.